Cindy Sheehan Is Working To Bring Our Troops Home: ”Mr. President. You have daughters. How would you feel if one of them was killed?“

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Casey Sheehan re-enlisted with the Army in August of 2003, knowing that his unit would eventually be deployed in Iraq. Casey, a Humvee mechanic with the 1st Calvary, was killed in Sadr City on April 4th of this year. He was only 24 years old. He is and forever will remain an American hero.

Casey’s mom, Cindy Sheehan, is a hero too. Angered that her son was sent to fight and die in an unjust war for reasons that have proven to be lies, Cindy is speaking out about the Iraq invasion. Cindy has joined other moms and families who have lost loved ones in the conflict to tell Americans about the true costs of the war. Their group, Real Voices http://realvoices.org/rv/index.html , is running television ads featuring the voices of Americans like Cindy speaking directly to President Bush about the impact of his failed policies and lies.

We are honored to bring you our interview with Cindy Sheehan about her son Casey and why she decided to speak out about the Iraq war.

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BuzzFlash: Your son Casey died April 4 in Iraq. Whom do you hold responsible for your loss?

Cindy Sheehan: George W. Bush.

BuzzFlash: Why?

Cindy Sheehan: I think he rushed into this war -–this invasion –- without having proper intelligence. And the reasons he went are so clearly wrong -–from his false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to there being no connection between Iraq and Saddam and Osama bin Laden. He diverted attention and troops and resources from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda to Iraq.

I don’t think Iraq has anything to do with the war on terror, except now terrorists are crossing the borders to go and kill innocent Iraqis and our troops. So he went almost unilaterally, with very little international support, to invade a country. They didn’t have a plan for the peace or for the occupation of Iraq.

My son was killed by Shiite insurgents. I believe George Bush created the insurgency by his failed policies and that’s why my son was killed.

BuzzFlash: Tell us a little bit about Casey. What kind of a young man was he? I know he was only 24 years old when he died.

Cindy Sheehan: He was an amazing person. He has been an altar server for 10 years. He finally quit when he graduated from high school and asked me, ”You know, Mom, can I quit altar serving? Can I be an usher or something now at Mass?“I was the coordinator of our youth Mass at our parish. And he was an Eagle Scout. He was a Eucharistic Minister, and he had trained to be a Eucharistic Minister in the field when they went to Iraq, to help the priest. But he was only there for two weeks before he was killed on Palm Sunday. He never missed Mass.

He had joined the Army because they promised him he could finish his college degree. He had already been going to college for three years before he joined the Army. My husband and I just went to Ft. Hood a couple weeks ago because the Catholic chapel he always went to was starting a new Knights of Columbus Council, and they decided to name it after Casey. It’s the Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan Knights of Columbus Council because they say that his love for his God, his church, his country and his family embodied what they want to stand for.

He was amazing. He was just the most calm and peaceful and gentle person that anybody would ever know. He was so quiet, but he had such an impact on everybody’s lives. And he was so brave. He saved American lives, but our question is, what are any of them doing there?

BuzzFlash: Casey, as I understand it, technically did not have to go to Iraq since he was a field mechanic. Is that correct?

Cindy Sheehan: He was a Humvee mechanic. He re-enlisted in August of 2003 because he didn’t want his buddies to do the job by themselves. It’s all about what they’re doing now — our soldiers are trying to keep themselves alive and trying to keep each other alive at this point right now.

BuzzFlash: When did Casey receive news that his unit was being sent to Iraq?

Cindy Sheehan: I think it was probably around last October, 2003, because they went to the National Training Center (NTC) at Ft. Irwin in the California desert in November. So we knew before he went to Ft. Irwin that they were going to be deployed sometime in March. Casey knew the First Cavalry was going to end up going to Iraq when he re-enlisted.

BuzzFlash: Did you have any correspondence with Casey while he was in Iraq before he was killed? Did he say or did you hear about what the situation was like on the ground?

Cindy Sheehan: He called me one time from Kuwait. They still hadn’t gone to Iraq. And he never complained. He said that it was hot and he was really busy because he had to get their vehicles ready to go on the convoy from Kuwait to Baghdad. He was on his way to Mass, and we talked about when he stopped in Ireland to refuel. We’re Irish, so he found an airport employee that was telling him about the history of our name, the Sheehan name.

He started writing us a letter on March 31st, because we didn’t know where we could send him mail or presents or supplies or anything yet. They didn’t tell them until they got to Saudi City where we could send them things. But he started writing us letters. And he said the convoy from Kuwait to Baghdad was real peaceful, and it looked like it was going to be an easy year of deployment. He wrote that on March 31st, and he was killed April 4th.

We never got the letter. It was in his things that we got from Baghdad. He didn’t even finish it.

BuzzFlash: President Bush told you, Casey, and every American, that we needed to invade Iraq to remove weapons of mass destruction — an assertion that, as you said, has proven to be a lie — and to fight terrorism, which is also untrue. When Casey left to go to Iraq, did the two of you talk about why you both felt that the United States was in Iraq, and what the United States was fighting for?

Cindy Sheehan: We didn’t understand why the United States was there. We never thought that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. But Casey told me, ”Mom, this is what we trained for. I’m ready. It’s my job. Because the sooner I get there, the sooner I’ll come home.“And he came home three weeks later in a flag-draped coffin.

BuzzFlash: Right now you, along with many other families who have lost loved ones in Iraq, are speaking out in various ways, part of which is a television ad criticizing Bush’s decision to mislead our country into a war. What made you decide to speak out, knowing the toll that it would take on you?

Cindy Sheehan: I have to. I can’t bring my son back. I can’t go back to April 3rd and bring Casey home. I can’t stand on the side while other mothers and families will have to go through what we’re going through. I have to speak out, and I have to help try to bring the troops home.

No matter who wins November 2 -–I hope it’s Kerry -–but no matter who wins, we have to hold them accountable. We have to start putting pressure on our elected officials to bring our troops home from the most unjust and mess of a war that our selected president has got us into.

BuzzFlash: Every month, there have been higher and higher American casualties.

Cindy Sheehan: Except for April, that was the highest. That’s the month my son was killed.

BuzzFlash: Right now, the situation is clearly deteriorating into a civil war. As a mom who’s lost a son in this war, how do you respond when you hear the president say that we need to stay the course in Iraq?

Cindy Sheehan: I respond: How can you stay a course that is so obviously not working? You’re going the wrong way. If you’re on a wrong course, you turn around and go the other way. He has betrayed us. He’s still betraying us, by telling us that everything is going well there. It’s shameful.

BuzzFlash: What would you say to President Bush if you could sit down in the same room and speak to him directly?

Cindy Sheehan: I actually got to meet face to face with the president. He called me ”Mom“ because he didn’t know my name, and he didn’t know my son’s name — he just knows that he’s meeting with these families that have lost loved ones. He said, ”Mom, I can’t imagine the pain you’re going through.“

I said, ”I think you can imagine it a little bit, Mr. President. You have daughters. How would you feel if one of them was killed?“

This is a new category that is really blowing up these days — self-administration of multiple gunshots by a suicide. Guinness will of course require that you die to enter in this category. For a long time, there were no contestants, because most suicides are content to shoot themselves once in the head, and leave it at that, either departing instantly for the realms of their ancestors, or falling over with a brain injury that renders them incapable of further gunplay. Practice for this category includes practicing multiple trigger-pulls with a staccato beat, hoping in this way to kill, as it were, two birds with one stone — first, eliminating the likelihood of survival, and second, possibly carving a permanent place for oneself in the history books.

One of the first entrants in this category was Gary Webb, the author of Dark Alliance, the multiple-article expose in the Mercury Sun that exposed the Nicaraguan Contra rebels as the prime suppliers of the cocaine that fueled the crack cocaine epidemic of the '80s, and made Crips and Bloods heroes for all of our children. After telling friends that he was being shadowed by government agents who had tried to break into his apartment, he shot himself multiple times in the head. Here is the Sacramento Bee Obituary.

Gary Webb, a prize-winning investigative journalist whose star-crossed career was capped with a controversial newspaper series linking the CIA to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, died Friday of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, officials said.

Mr. Webb, 49, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning of gunshot wounds to the head, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office said Saturday.

He left a note, but officials would not disclose its contents.

"I'm still in a state of shock," said Tom Dresslar, who works as a spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and had known Mr. Webb for 15 years.

The two worked together when the Joint Legislative Audit Committee was investigating the Davis administration over the failed Oracle Corp. software contract.

Dresslar said Mr. Webb brought all the skills and tenacity that he had honed as an investigative reporter to his job as an investigator for the Assembly. "I was proud to work with him and call him a friend," Dresslar said.

Mr. Webb was divorced and had three children, according to Dresslar.

Most recently, Mr. Webb had been reporting for the Sacramento News & Review, covering politics and state government.

Mr. Webb had been working in the California Assembly speaker's Office of Member Services until February, when he was ousted after the new speaker, Fabian Núñez, took office.

Mr. Webb won more than 30 journalism awards in his career, which included stints with the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the San Jose Mercury News.

But it was Mr. Webb's tenure at the Mercury News from 1988 to 1997 that made his name in the business and eventually drove him from daily newspapers.

Mr. Webb, who was based in the newspaper's Sacramento bureau, authored a three-part investigative series in 1996 that linked the CIA to Nicaraguan Contras seeking to overthrow the Sandin ista government and to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding south-central Los Angeles in the 1980s.

The series, "Dark Alliances: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," was controversial almost from the start.

Even as newspapers nationwide carried versions of Mr. Webb's reporting and congressional leaders called for investigations, the CIA director at the time visited Los Angeles for an unprecedented town hall meeting with area residents at which he denied the allegations and was met with loud jeers.

Three of the nation's leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, followed up with reports questioning Mr. Webb's conclusions, and eventually his own newspaper turned on him.

In a letter to readers published in the Mercury News in May 1997, then-Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos told readers there had been problems with the series and that "we fell short at every step of our process - in the writing, editing and production of our work."

Within a month of that note's publication, Mr. Webb told the Washington Post that he had been pulled off the story, and his editors had told him they would not publish his follow-ups.

He also said he was fighting a transfer from the Sacramento bureau to a posting in Cupertino.

By then, however, his fate at the Mercury News was sealed, and he left the paper that year, eventually taking a job with the Assembly.

Mr. Webb later published a 548-page book based on his series, and in a 1998 interview with The Bee he said he still was befuddled over how he became notorious while the allegations in his stories were dismissed.

"That is an amazing phenomenon," he said. "I'm still not exactly sure how that happened."

About the writer: The Bee's Sam Stanton can be reached at (916) 321-1091 or sstanton@sacbee.com.

While Gary Webb's double-shot suicide has provoked some wild speculation that the Arkansas cops who investigated the case were not very bright, this kind of carping should not detract from Webb's remarkable feat. Nevertheless, while startling, a local Oregon housewife outdid him three years ago, before Webb's suicide was even a twinkle in his own eye.

In 2002, in our nearby burg of Central Point, Oregon, Kerry Repp, the wife of an Oregon State Police academy graduate blew the doors off Webb's record, shooting herself four times with her husband's pistol, while on the phone to 911, screaming her head off. The four bullets had entry points in the face, chin, neck and chest. What a pattern! This woman had the control, the style, that catapults a suicide to the top of the charts.

Of course, it is only great police work that can unearth the evidence necessary to sustain one of these awards. First, the cops must keep an open mind, like they did in the Kerry Repp case, not defaulting out to a conclusion of “murder” simply because it was unlikely that the dead person had shot themselves four times. After all, Sherlock Holmes said we eliminate “the impossible,” before concluding that “whatever remains must be the truth. And in this case, it was obviously not impossible for Kerry Repp to shoot herself four times. At least, it was less impossible than that her cop-husband, Gary Repp, had shot her four times. That was truly unbelievable, so of course there had to be another explanation. Since a skeptical public might easily jump to conclusions hearing about the four gunshots to the corpse, it's important for a police investigator to not blow these incendiary facts out of proportion, and thus the best course is that followed by Central Point Police Chief Mike Sweeny — just refuse to reveal these facts to the media.

Police probe shooting death The pregnant Central Point woman died while her husband and two children were away By BILL KETTLERMail Tribune

CENTRAL POINT - Police said Sunday they have no suspects in the shooting death of the pregnant wife of a National Guardsman who was scheduled to leave the Rogue Valley this week for duty overseas. Kerry Michelle Repp's body was found Saturday afternoon in their Central Point home, near Crater High School. Central Point Police Chief Mike Sweeny would not say where or how Repp, 29, had been shot. Her husband, Gary Marvin Repp Jr., 33, was scheduled to leave this week with the 186th Infantry Battalion of the Oregon Army National Guard for the Sinai Peninsula. The soldiers leave Thursday for Fort Carson, Colo., for two months of advanced training and will then spend six months in the Sinai Peninsula on peacekeeping duty.

Sweeny said Gary Repp and the couple's two children were away from home on a trip with other family members when the shooting occurred. Kerry Repp was about three months pregnant with the couple's third child. Sweeny said investigators still had not determined how the shooting happened. ”We haven't determined if there's even a crime at this time. We haven't been able to conclusively determine if it was a self-inflicted wound or if she was shot by another person.“

Gary Repp had just finished recruit school with the Oregon State Police and had been assigned to the Lakeview district, said state police Lt. Dan Durbin. He was being trained in the Rogue Valley because the Lakeview district did not have enough troopers to give him field training time. Gary Repp, a 1987 graduate of North Medford High School, and a 1990 graduate of Southern Oregon State College, also had worked as a Jackson County probation and parole officer and a Medford police officer.

Investigators came and went from the Repp's Hazel Avenue house Sunday evening as the search for evidence continued. An American flag and a black POW-MIA flag hung beside the garage, and petunias bloomed in a planter box. Durbin said Repp's National Guard orders would most likely be canceled. ”My intention is to contact his superiors (today) and see what his status is.“

Gary Repp is a captain in the battalion staff office, said Maj. Ron McKay, chaplain for the Guard unit. He oversees the unit's operations, but does not command troops in the field.

”The mission will go forward,“ McKay said. ”If he's not available to perform his duties, there'll be somebody else to step into his place.“ Sweeny said Jackson County's major assault and death investigation unit will pursue the case. The unit includes police officers from Medford, Ashland and Central Point, Oregon State Police, Jackson County Sheriff's Department, and the Jackson County District Attorney's office. ”It's fairly obvious that we're scrutinizing this even more extensively because (Gary Repp) was involved in the criminal justice community,“ Sweeny said. Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail bkettler@mailtribune.com

Because of my past work as a local prosecutor, I knew Mike Sweeny when he was a Medford Patrol Officer, and as far as I could tell he was not blind, nor was he particularly dim-witted. So I must conclude that something told this fine investigator that despite the four shots, there was something about the situation that clued him to the fact that, somehow, this woman had shot herself. Of course, sometimes this means bucking the medical evidence, but in pursuit of the truth, that has to be done:

For a while, justice lost its course. Jackson County District Attorney, who was my boss about ten years ago, couldn't see past the ”obvious,“ and charged Gary Repp with the murder.

Repp arrested for wife's murderRepp arrested for wife's murder He is taken into custody at the state police office, where he was being fired from his job as a trooper By SARAH LEMON Mail Tribune

Former state trooper Gary Marvin Repp Jr. was arrested Wednesday and charged with murdering his wife. A grand jury will hear the case Tuesday, said District Attorney Mark Huddleston. Gary Repp was arrested at 10:45 a.m. in the Oregon State Police regional headquarters in Central Point, where he was being terminated from his employment with OSP, said Central Point police Chief Mike Sweeny. ”We had sufficient probable cause, and it was agreed upon ... that this was the best time to make the arrest,“ Sweeny said. Gary Repp was the only ”person of interest“ police had named in the case, although there were several others who were not identified. Investigators eliminated all others who either had alibis or who could not have murdered Kerry Repp, Sweeny said. Gary Repp did not confess to murdering his wife, Sweeny added. OSP runs extensive background checks on all recruits and, based on its investigation, had no reason to believe that Gary Repp wasn't an ”excellent candidate“ for OSP, Lt. Dan Durbin said Wednesday. He stressed that Repp was to be a probationary employee for 18 months. His on-duty conduct would have been continuously monitored by a senior OSP trooper. ”We're not so naive to think that there aren't issues in a person's background that would manifest themselves," Durbin said. OSP hired Repp in December last year. He graduated from the Oregon State Police Recruit School on April 12. Gary Repp also is a captain in the Oregon Army National Guard and was scheduled to deploy with his battalion on a peace-keeping mission to Egypt last week. No word on his official status with the Guard was available Wednesday. Officials will release little information about the case before it goes to grand jury, Sweeny said. Details about the autopsy, physical evidence at the scene and the timeline of Kerry Repp's death all are key elements in the grand jury testimony and cannot be discussed beforehand, Sweeny said. Police said last week that Kerry Repp was shot more than once with a handgun found near her body. Police would not say how many times she had been shot or the location of the bullet wounds. Police searched the homes of Gary and Kerry Repp and Gary's brother, Lance Repp, who lives in the 1000 block of Ingrid Street in Medford. The warrants were sealed. Kerry Repp's graveside service - planned for Friday at Eagle Point National Cemetery Interment Shelter - was postponed Wednesday. Kerry Repp's body was released to her husband after last week's autopsy, police said. A new date for the service was not set. The Repps reportedly had a difficult relationship, and Kerry Repp had filed for divorce last month. However, she asked that the papers not be served, police said. The couple reportedly was living together trying to reconcile. Kerry Repp's family would not talk about the case Wednesday. Gary Repp's family declined comment. Reach reporter Sarah Lemon at 776-4487, or e-mail slemon@mailtribune.com.

Justice took a long time to get back on track, but thanks to the fact that other Oregon State Police Officers kept the faith, like Mike Barnett, writing from freegaryrepp@hotmail.com, ultimately, the truth was revealed. Gary, a father of two and a peacekeeper, was cleared of guilt, and Kerry's place in the record-books was made secure, perhaps forever. Here's what Mike Barnett said in his post at a whiney-cop website called http://www.guardroom.com, dredged out of Google cache, since the whiners closed down their bitch forum:

OSP Mike Barnett

Yes, there are many innocent people wrongly convicted of a crime every year. A very similar case is going on in Medford, Oregon right now. Gary Repp, a ”former“ State Police Officer, was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife. He was not at home at the time of the murder and there is absolutely NO evidence (physical, witnesses, otherwise) that link him to the crime. There is nothing at all, yet the police hold him in jail just because they can. His trial is set for May 2003, but it's very frightening to think that yet another innocent man could be sent to jail for life and possibly get the death penalty for a crime which the police KNOW HE DID NOT COMMIT. It is a shame with high quality people are falsley accused by the ”law“ in order to hide misconduct within the ”law". The system is out of order and needs to be changed. Posted by: M. Barnett (freegaryrepp@hotmail.com) on January 14, 2003 07:51 PM Google cache link

Yes, for a time poor Gary Repp sat in jail, and eventually had to stand trial before a jury of his peers, even though there was a suicide note, and even though his wife had sent an email to her hotmail account, logging in at Gary’s office at the Medford Armory, and the email said she was depressed. Even though some of Gary’s cop friends swore there was no way he could have killed Kerry and have gotten to the ball game without a drop of blood on him as quickly as he did. He had to stand trial.

Even if Kerry Repp could have warned police of her murder, 9-1-1 operators most likely wouldn’t have understood her cry for help. A shot to the back of the neck broke Repp’s jaw as she cradled telephone the morning of her May 4, 2002, murder, police said. The wound would have rendered Repp’s speech unintelligible, said forensic pathologist James Olson. A pillow held between the gun and Repp’s head muffled the shot. Investigators testifying Friday for prosecutors against accused murderer Gary Marvin Repp Jr. outlined the series of four gunshots that killed Kerry Repp in the bedroom of her Central Point home. The testimony was heard in Jackson County Circuit Court. Presenting an illustration of Kerry Repp at the time of her murder, prosecutors showed a woman sitting on the edge of a bed with a cordless telephone in her left hand, a gun aimed at a downward angle behind her head. Blood and pieces of bone and teeth were found on the phone’s mouthpiece. Emergency dispatchers got the call that Kerry Repp attempted to make at 8:23 a.m., but when no one answered, the operator disconnected the line. Officers were not sent to the house though they should have been, according to police protocol. The first shot to the back of Kerry Repp’s neck was followed by two others underneath her chin and below her chin in the center of her neck. The final gunshot to Kerry’s heart killed her, Olson said. One of the pillows found near the bed shows rips caused by the gun’s blast, Olson said. Forensic scientists said they caused similar rents in another pillowcase when test-firing the murder weapon. The evidence suggested the shooter placed a pillow between the gun and its target, Olson said. Using his knowledge of crime scenes, former Oregon State Police trainee Gary Marvin Repp Jr., set up his wife’s murder to look like a suicide, District Attorney Mark Huddleston has argued. However, recruits who attended OSP training camp with Repp described their study of crime scenes as basic. During the four-month session, which concluded about three weeks before Kerry Repp’s murder, recruits were instructed on how to scan a crime scene for suspects and secure it for further investigation, troopers said. An eight-hour course on latent fingerprints, particularly their presence on guns, was given, troopers said. Prosecutors noted that no fingerprints could be found at Kerry Repp’s murder scene. The killer could have worn gloves, investigators said. Prosecutors will present more evidence of fingerprints associated with Kerry Repp’s murder as the trial continues next week in Circuit Court. FBI officials who analyzed the May 4, 2002, 9-1-1 call also are expected to testify. Reach reporter Sarah Lemonat 776-4487, or e-mail slemon@mailtribune.com

February 11, 2004 Jurors learn of couple’s history By SARAH LEMON Mail Tribune

Well, eventually a jury saw the truth, but I can’t quote a local newspaper article on the topic, because I think the verdict struck the reporter speechless, or was for some other reason absented from the newspaper’s website. Fortunately, this letter to the editor made it clear that Gary Repp was in fact acquitted:

Jury not convinced Letters regarding the Gary Repp murder trial show many opinions, but not a lot of knowledge.

One, from White City, calls the trial a ”rush to judgment,“ yet later says adjudication took two years. The same writer indicated his/her own feeling of reasonable doubt, yet calls the justice system (which exonerated Repp) ”criminal.“ I did not follow this trial so I won’t comment on the verdict. But I know a jury finding of ”not guilty" is not the same as being innocent. Not guilty simply means 12 carefully-selected people were not convinced. — M. Conens, Medford

Yes, I know the author of the letter, because it’s a small town, and Matt Conens used to be a cameraman for local TV. Well his opinion is his opinion, and you can’t unring the bell. Gary Repp’s reputation is ruined. Like Gary Repp’s fellow officer Mike Barnett said, it is a shame when an unfair shadow of blame is cast over a fine person who just had the bad luck to live with a suicide who just had to break all the records, and so here is the lesson. If you decide you want to try shooting yourself multiple times as a suicide stunt, you should videotape it, because otherwise you could get someone innocent in a lot of trouble, and you won’t be around to explain it. So go to the extra trouble, videotape yourself shooting yourself, and there won’t be any shadow of murder cast over your relatives, or any question about the nature of your achievement. For example, suppose you decided to empty an entire Uzi clip into your face – that might work, especially if you like jammed a stick between the trigger guard and the trigger. You might end up with thirty rounds in your mug, clearly dwarfing the achievements of past contestants like Kerry Repp. But without video evidence, who would believe it? So why skimp? You only die once, after all.

I looked forward to watching “Team America,” a puppet-show satire of American foreign policy by “the makers of South Park,” even going so far as to actually watch the movie the same night I rented the DVD. Usually I’d rather read, and Tara pushes the movie agenda, but on this night, I had something I wanted to see. But having seen it, I must caution you to handle it with care, like a dead gopher your cat brought you. And please don’t leave this around kids. It’s loaded with sick ideas that are insidiously communicated using established techniques of subliminal persuasion. It doesn’t make much difference that puppets, rather than human actors, collapse in their own vomit, engage in sex that culminates with the girl shitting on the guy’s face, hack each other to bits, set others on fire, and are decapitated, detonated and impaled in the course of the movie. Indeed, the effect may be worse than seeing actors engaging in this stuff, because in that case, we’d just turn it off as “too violent.” But with puppets, they’ve got you off guard, and the traumatizing images stun the mind while explicit, implicit, and subliminal notions establish cross-currents of confusion, rendering you vulnerable to the really sick ideas that the creators of the movie want to disseminate.

By using puppets with large heads, about four times larger that a normal adult head, the puppeteers cause us to perceive the puppets as little babies, invoking our instinctive response to find them endearing. Mickey Mouse, Tweety Pie, and Joe Camel also exploit this hard-wired feature of human response to feel protective and emotive toward children. Such characters, that manifest child traits in adulthood, are called “neotenic.” “Neoteny is a term in developmental biology that describes the retention of juvenile characteristics in the adults of a species.” (Wikipedia entry for “neoteny.”) In simpler terms, these puppets are cute. “Cuteness is usually characterized by some combination of infant-like physical traits, especially small size, a large head, large eyes, a small nose, and chubby limbs. … Konrad Lorenz argued in 1950 that infantile features triggered nurturing responses in adults [citing as evidence] that humans react more positively to animals who look like infants — with big eyes, big heads, shortened noses, etc. — than to animals who are less cute. … Another way to phrase Lorenz's point is to say that humans prefer animals which exhibit neoteny.” (Wikipedia entry for “Cuteness.”) It’s traumatic when creatures that we find endearing and worthy of protection are blown up, dismembered, splattered, and burned before our eyes.

However, if we are already laughing when this happens, we may tend to keep laughing even as it happens, telling ourselves that, after all they are just puppets, and it’s all just in good fun. Right, like simulated child pornography would be fun. No, the violence in this film is really pornographic because it is so mean-spiritedly directed at movie-industry peace activists. It’s not actually funny, or in any way connected to reality, to depict Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, and Helen Hunt, as murderous terrorists who will kill to establish world peace. It’s demented to depict Michael Moore, smeared with mustard, waving a hot-dog, a slice of pizza, detonating himself in a suicide bombing of Mt. Rushmore. It’s tasteless and disgusting to splatter an effigy of Holly Hunter into a bloody mess, to decapitate Samuel Jackson, and split Alec Baldwin’s braincase open to expose the contents, and to repeat the image three times. Serial imagery of extreme death and mutilation of the brain cavity? How hilarious! Sure they’re just puppets. But if you found a puppet of you hanging from a rope in your front yard, you wouldn’t just think it was a puppet. It would be a threat. This movie is an assault on each of those individuals, an expression of mortal hatred elaborated with millions of dollars of effort to deliver a personal insult and an explicit threat. Shut up, or we’ll kill you.

There is nothing to recommend this movie, and life is too short to spend on a movie like this when you could be doing something really worthwhile, like petting your dog, picking your nose, or breaking wind. The thesis of the movie is far too banal and degrading to be worthy of my recounting. While digital ink may cost next to nothing, your time and mine are worth something. My suggestion is to boycott anything the South Park hoodlums produce. Put these shitbags out of business and send them back to the Home for Retarded Republicans who actually are such nerds they think they’re cool. And for a minute they had me thinking it, too. Until I realized the joke was on me.

Larry Greenemeier for InformationWeek wrote this almost cluelessly upbeat article about Spotfire, a piece of software created by a CIA-funded “VC R&D project,” (wow-we're open about this stuff these days, aren't we?). Doesn't matter what they call it. Once we read the label, it's clearly Carnivore 2.0. You remember Carnivore, the software that let Admiral Poindexter — convicted felon and guru of Total Information Awareness — read all our email. Carnivore evolved from Echelon, and while it was neat to read all that email, the intellibots didn't like spam much, either. Kind of like having your coke cut far below Noriega-quality, spam ate into the data-richness of Carnivore's turf. And they realized, they needed to take it further. Screw raw information — let's digest it, process it, drill down into people's lives and just see the red dots light up blinking “terrorist cell in Omaha.” Once you get to that point, then probable cause can be premised on computer error, and we can blow up anybody like the FBI did the Branch Davidians, and no one can be blamed. It's just a regrettable computer error. At least, that's the ominous unintended consequence of any software that links up political thoughts, speech, identities and geography. You are the target, and the bomber is staffed by a cowboy on a mission.

Revealing E-Mail's Secrets Aug. 1, 2005 Tool lets analysts create a picture of communicators and can be used to fight terrorists and help businesses

With the threat of terrorism high, the intelligence community is investing in technology that can help analysts quickly examine communications, particularly E-mailed messages, in order to spot suspected terrorists. Backed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's technology incubator, Spotfire Inc. this week will introduce a tool for uncovering patterns and relationships in information extracted from E-mail messages that will be as useful for anti-terrorism efforts as it will be for analyzing business data.

Homegrown programs and text-mining tools are available from a variety of vendors to extract data about an E-mail and information contained within a message. Spotfire's product, DecisionSite for Email Analysis, goes to work on that data and presents the results in tables or grids with different-sized splotches of color that indicate data patterns. DecisionSite's Email Portfolio feature allows analysts to store and link E-mail addresses and any other attributes to build a detailed picture of communicators and their activities. E-mail messages also can be mapped geographically using a variety of mapping technologies, including ESRI Inc.'s ArcGIS software.

Spotfire is looking to push business intelligence and reporting to the next level for both government agencies and commercial businesses, CEO Christopher Ahlberg says.

In-Q-Tel first approached Spotfire in 2003 when the CIA-backed venture-capital firm was looking to invest in technology that could find critical patterns by translating and analyzing data. “Unstructured information is at the core of the analysis that the intelligence community wants to do,” Ahlberg says.

Although In-Q-Tel is neither part of the CIA nor a government agency, it does receive input from the CIA regarding where it should invest. “We never know if the CIA uses the technology in which we invest,” says Eric Kaufmann, In-Q-Tel's managing partner and senior VP. “They give us a general direction, such as visualization.”

Kaufmann won't say how much In-Q-Tel has invested in Spotfire, but the firm sees the company's visualization technology as a breakthrough for E-mail analysis. “We identified Spotfire as a leader in the visualization” market, he says. That market is important because it's a place where visualization hasn't yet been used. “E-mail has become an increasing part of electronic discovery.”

THE POSSIBLE DOUBLE HOMICIDE OF TERRY AND ARIEKA CARR, by Charles Carreon

10:09 pm, August 29, 2005 The attached video records your intrepid reporter collecting direct evidence in Clear Lake Oaks, California, where “On Golden Pond” director Terry Carr and his nine year old daughter Arieka were found dead in Mr. Carr's Jeep Cherokee on August 1st. The Jeep had been parked outside the Tower Market, the busiest place in town, from 4 am until the bodies of father and daughter were discovered lying in their underwear sometime after 1:30 pm. The Lake County Sheriff's office says a Tower Market employee saw movement in the vehicle at 10 or 11 am. Temperatures reached 104 degrees that day. Forensic reports says substance or sexual abuse has been ruled out. The Sheriff says Mr. Carr had a heart attack and collapsed on his nine year old, causing her to expire. Having gone to the location of the father-daughter death, I must register my serious objection to this explanation.

My attention was piqued when Mr. Carr and Arieka vanished from the Market of Choice in my homebase in Ashland, Oregon and turned up dead 270 miles away under circumstances utterly mysterious. In fact, I was a grocery clerk at the predecessor of Market of Choice, Meister's Buy-Rite, back in the late seventies, so the thought that Mr. Carr might have been the victim of foul play that started in Ashland felt like an invasion of my turf. When I learned that Mr. Carr had suddenly disposed of a clutch of personal belongings and files by hurriedly discarding them in a field by side of the road that leads out to the Ashland municipal dump, it seemed that too many strange signs were adding up in the wrong column. After visiting the place of Terry and Arieka Carr's death last weekend, I am even less satisfied by the coroner's explanation that Mr. Carr killed his child by falling on her in the throes of a heartattack. Come with me to the scene of the deaths and judge for yourself whether the police have provided a sufficiently credible theory to close the book on this very suspicious possible double homicide.

Because I excused myself from going to Burning Man, just down the road from here, whereto no doubt the numerous dreadlocked and footloose creatures seen hereabouts are blowing toward, my friend John Potts, who's going to be there live and in real time, sent me this missive:

From: JP Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:21 AM To: CC Subject: How to have the Burning Man experience from the comfort of your own home:

Tear down your house. Put it in a truck. Drive 10 hours in any direction. Put the house back together. Invite everyone you meet to come over and party. When everyone leaves, follow them back to their homes, drink all their booze, and break things.

Stack all your fans in one corner of your livingroom. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.

Pitch your tent next to the wall of speakers in a crowded, noisy club. Go to sleep. Wake up 2 hours later in a 110+ degree tent.

Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away. Drain all the water from the toilet. Only flush it every 4 days. Hide all the toilet paper.

Visit a restaurant and pay them to let you alternate lying in the walk-in freezer and sitting in the oven.

Don't sleep for 5 days. Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/emotion-altering drugs. Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.

Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, and dance close naked;

-- then tell you they have a lover back home at the end of the night.

Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don't go to a doctor.

Buy a new pair of favorite shoes. Throw one shoe away.

Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.

Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift stores for the perfect, most outrageous costume. Forget to pack it.

Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until you think you are going to scream. Scream. Realize you'll love the music for the rest of your life.

Get so drunk you can't recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.

Sprinkle dirty sand in all your food.

Mail $200 to the Reno casino of your choice.

Go to a museum. Find one of Salvador Dali's more disturbing but beautiful paintings. Climb inside it.

Spend thousands of dollars on a deeply personal art work. Hide it in a funhouse on the edge of the city. Blow it up.

Set up a DJ system downwind of a three alarm fire. Play a short loop of drum'n'bass fortissimo until the embers are cold.

Have a 3 a.m. soul-baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile, and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you're hallucinating.

And I might add: Do all that and spend a whole year thinking about doing it all again but bigger.

TEXTBOOK PUBLISHERS ARE BLUFFING IN BATTLE WITH GOOGLE, by Charles Carreon

8:49 pm, September 4, 2005

You heard it here first — the textbook publisher associations will be forced to accept Google's plan to digitize a searchable database of books drawn from the Stanford, NYU, and other university libraries. This is because ultimately all publishers will win as Google boosts the value of literacy, increases the ease of scholarly research, and returns serious thinking to its proper place somewhere near the apex of human activity, and distinctly above warfare and stock-car racing. While the paper-pulp-pushers who think of themselves as Publishing's Old Guard prepare to die in the last ditch, the vanguard of the battle has already swept past them. The future is digital. Paper is dust.

Christopher T. Heun for InternetWeek wrote:

Courts Unlikely To Stop Google Book Copying Despite objections from publishers and writers, copyright law appears to be on Google's side, legal experts say. The social value of Google's initiative to digitize library books, including those protected by copyright, will likely weigh heavily in the search engine's favor. Should the growing number of publishing groups, who oppose the plan by Google Inc. to digitize the collections of some of the world’s major libraries, fail to reach an agreement and turn instead to the courts, they may have a tough road ahead of them.

Although Google may appear to violate the law by scanning, without permission, entire copies of books protected by copyright, such an act is not illegal if it is considered “fair use” of the material. How a court interprets that doctrine will decide the fate of the company’s ambitious plans, according to lawyers and law professors with knowledge of intellectual property and copyright statues. They say the most important issues for a court would be the character of Google’s activity, its adverse economic impact on the copyright holder, and the amount of material it uses in proportion to the whole and if that is key to the work. Of lesser concern is whether the company makes a reasonable effort to contact copyright holders before copying their books.

“Google would probably win” a court case, says William Fisher, who teaches intellectual property law at Harvard Law School and is the director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Google is a profit-making venture, that counts against it, but what it is doing is a highly socially valuable activity and that counts highly in its favor.”

A potential legal battle is slowly gathering strength. The Text and Academic Authors Association this week joined the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in publicly stating it is ready to take on Google in the courtroom.

The two sides are playing a game of chicken over who should dictate what works are digitized: Google says it will not scan any titles publishers tell it not to; publishers insist it should work the other way around. “The solution we’d like to see [Google] heading toward is to say here is a list of books we’d like to include, may we have permission to do so,” says Peter Givler, the executive director of the Association of American University Presses. The scanning has stopped temporarily but will resume in November.

One law professor doesn’t think that’s necessary. “The principle that Google should have to ask [for permission] is proving untenable,” says Jessica Litman, a professor at Wayne State University Law School who has published a book on protecting intellectual property on the Internet, “Digital Copyright.” “The opt-out mechanism is pretty reasonable.” The source of the squabble is the Google Print Library Project, which aims to scan and store in the company’s search database copyrighted books from the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library. Google’s ultimate goal, according to its Web site, is to build a “comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers find new readers.”

If a work included in a search query is covered by a copyright, Google limits the amount of text shown to a few sentences adjacent to the search term; the full text is available for any book with an expired copyright now considered public domain – for instance, a novel published in 1905.

Sounds fair enough. But publishers don’t see it that way. They look at the library project not as an altruistic endeavor but a profit-making venture that will harm their own business. As proof they point out that Google, which relies on advertising for the vast majority of its revenue – a record $1.4 billion for the quarter that ended June 30 – allows sponsored links on the search results page for Google Print. It’s enough to make them wonder: if one search engine can appropriate a publisher’s intellectual property, then isn’t it logical to assume that others, like Yahoo! and Microsoft, will be next?

“If copyright law worked the way Google would like to see it working, then everyone in the world would be able to use the material unless the copyright holder explicitly told them not to, and even then it would be OK,” says Allan Adler, the vice president for legal and government affairs for the Association of American Publishers. “That would be a very strange copyright system.”

Regardless, there is a clear legal precedent for any potential court battle between publishers and Google, and it favors the Mountain View, Calif., company. In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., a 2003 case in which a photographer sued a search engine, claiming copyright infringement for displaying thumbnail images of work originally posted on his site, the Ninth Circuit found in favor of the search engine: the act of copying the material, even though it was for commercial purposes, was not exploitative and therefore was fair use. “Everything the Ninth Circuit stated with respect to Arriba applies with equal force to the Print Library Project,” Jonathan Band, a copyright lawyer in Washington, D.C., who represents Internet companies and library associations on intellectual property matters, wrote recently in a copyright analysis of the dispute. Google’s copies of books will not replace the originals, and the company does not profit from the sale of any books it scans, he wrote. Band does not represent any entity with respect to the Google Print project.

“The Google Print Library Project will make it easier than ever before for users to locate the wealth of information buried in books,” Band concluded. “By limiting the search results to a few sentences before and after the search term, the program will not conflict with the normal exploitation of works nor unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of rights holders. To the contrary, it will often increase demand for copyrighted works.”

For further legal precedent, David Donahue, an associate at Fross Zelnick Lehrman & Zissu, a New York firm that specializes in trademark, copyright and unfair competition law, cites two cases involving the distribution of photocopies of articles from scientific and medical journals.

In American Geophysical Union vs. Texaco Inc., the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found in 1994 that a private company did not have the right to photocopy entire works and hand them out to its research staff. But in Williams & Wilkins Co. vs. The United States Records, an equally divided Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s decision that it was fair use for a library to photocopy research journals and distribute them. “Google lies somewhere in between those two cases,” Donahue says.

Complicating the debate over copyright is the fact that publishers often don’t even know who has it. Their records can be incomplete, particularly if an author is deceased, in which case an estate or family member could hold the rights. A book with an unknown copyright status is known as an “orphan work.” Most works published prior to 1923 are now in the public domain, because the term of protection, the life of the author plus 70 years, is likely over. Conversely, works published in the last 30 years or so probably have an ISDN number and are tracked through a database, “so there should be little question about who holds the copyright,” Adler says. The tough part is determining the status of books published in those five decades in between. “Were talking about millions of books,” he says. “Orphan works are not in the public domain.”

The Copyright Office, at the request of Congress, has studied the “orphan works” issue and should publish its recommendations later this year, which will likely be passed into law. Publishers believe that copyright holders of orphan works, should they eventually make a claim, are entitled to a reasonable compensation, but Google using their works in the meantime shouldn’t be treated as infringement, as long as the company makes an honest effort to find them.

By now, lawsuits shouldn’t faze Google. Agence France-Presse, angry that its content appears in search results, filed a $17.5 million copyright infringement in March; adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 Inc. is asking a federal court in Los Angeles to prevent Google from displaying pictures and links to the company’s copyrighted photos; and two companies have sued Google over its practice of keyword advertising.

In the end, winning a fair use argument against Google could be tough, since its entire business model revolves around the principle. “Google couldn’t exist at all without making copies,” Litman says. “It’s a search engine. It makes copies in order to index content.

Now I understand why Celine Dion is called a great singer. She is a great human being. See this video from CNN, where she rejects excuses for the continuing neglect of suffering people in New Orleans, and compares the US military's ability to kill “all the people in an entire country” with the government's gross inaction and mis-action in New Orleans. Larry King, the interviewer, tries to interfere with her outpouring of real sentiment, but she just mows him down. Her acapella prayer at the end of the interview is very beautiful.

Bush's handlers are eager to show that their boy is not “out of touch.” This becomes more difficult daily, as it becomes apparent that the handlers are also out of touch. The raft of stories coming out of New Orleans shows that FEMA and the Dept of “Homeland Security” are completely out of their element when dealing with a job that demands pasting your ass to a chair, sitting at a desk, and manning the phone lines to direct an enormous logistical effort.

On the issue of the top dingleberry being out of touch, I guess it's a matter of “like mother, like son.” For real, orbital, out-of-touchness, Barbara Bush can't be beat — listen to the sound clip of her below, expressing the opinion that the evacuees are really quite fortunate to be flooded out of house and home, have their relatives drowned, and be treated like drowning rats — better off in the drink. But her son the president is not far behind, as Nancy Pelosi made clear when she reported his delivery of an amazing Bushism, as reported in the Houston Chronicle quote below.

Houston Chronicle

At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”

She related that she urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Brown.

He said, “Why would I do that?” Pelosi said.

I said, “Because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.”

And he said “What didn't go right?”

You can play a very short video of Nancy Pelosi relating Bush's statement using Winamp. There are many other Katrina-related videos at Katrina Little Movies (You have to sign up to join this website, but it is really worth it for all of the incredible material there.)

The reason this boondoggle is going to blow up in Bush's face is simply because it is so damned obvious that no only do they not give a flying fuck about New Orleans or its people — they also view this as an opportunity to prove that you can, in fact, fool all of the voters all of the time. The media has spun this story six different ways from Sunday, but regardless of the spin, the atrocity of contemptful neglect that Bush has demonstrated toward the injured Southerners should chap hides all across America. With Senator Mary Landrieu threatening to punch Bush's lights out if he criticizes Louisiana authorities one more time, Bush could be in for the celebrity death match of his life.

Pride cometh before the fall, and certainly pride has been the Ace up Bush's sleeve in one surprising deal after another. This time, though, being out of touch can be terminal, as when he joked that New Orleans would rise again and become a place where rich kids can “have too much fun.” Yes, and all of the manicured lawns and beautiful golf courses will be restored, and then he'll come back.

I have often thought to myself, “What will Bush's Falklands be?” You'll remember that it was the misbegotten adventurism of an Argentine junta at its wits end for further distractions that led to its destruction. The future history might read like this:

Encyclopedia Liberalica

”By September 2005, Bush had destroyed the nation's financial solvency, declared war on Islam internationally, sent the entire National Guard to depose Iraq's government, alienated the European nations by feeding the fires of international warfare, invited a trade war with Canada over softwood, and directed his proxy Pat Robertson to announce a jihad against Venezuela. Then G-d decided to open yet another front in the worldwide conflict, and directed his armies of wind and waves to destroy the entire Biloxi staging base for the Iraq war, to destroy New Orleans in one day, to create a huge demand for the absent National Guard, to choke off the nation's supply of crude and refined oil by devastating Louisiana and Mississipp, and killed the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, all in just over a week. G-d also saw fit to assure the destruction of the Bush junta by hardening the hearts of the Pharaoh's men, so that their TV messages were not at all reassuring, and their sound bites were like stones, and broke the teeth of viewers who sought to consume them. So a great wave of anger rose up in the hearts of the people, and like a tsunami of rage, destroyed the Bush junta."

Matt Wells, of the BBC, has his own optimistic take on the media situation, in the article quoted below. He thinks the media is going to redeem itself by getting a grain of social conscience and learning to talk back to the Bush spin machine. Somehow I doubt it. Rove and his double-dealers will be calling in every favor, threatening every troublesome newsperson with exposure for small or large crimes, endangering their jobs, grabbing short hairs and whispering soft threats. Soon the media will remember its place.

I mean, I like Matt's article, but the idea that FOX is gonna come to Jesus over this issue is quite fanciful. They'll be blasting away at Cindy Sheehan, and supporting Pat Robertson, and hefting the Grand Inquisitor Gonzales into his Supreme Court seat in short order.

Matt has other fantasies, like how there'll be so many new Louisiana voters in Texas after this exodus from Louisiana, but I hate to tell you, after they register in Texas, they're all going to turn out to be felons!

Matt believes that the Bush administration's true colors have been revealed, and that is going to rock the corporate kleptocracy to its foundations. That is all too optimistic. Right, and the supply of suckers being born every minute has recently been reduced to a trickle. I think not. People remain as stupid as ever, and if the worst fears of the Libertarians take shape, and large internment camps are set up to hold the evacuees under military guard like the INS interned the Haitian boat people for years, who will stop that? The media hasn't even rebelled over the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib.

Now that the civil rights violations are happening here on home turf, it will take tremendous intelligence and dedication for the nation to use this opportunity to unseat the hegemonic forces that have settled astride the people of the nation. Haliburton has already got its snout into the feedbag for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, and ultimately we are going to see a land grab so big it will make the theft of California from Mexico, the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and the Louisiana Purchase itself, seem like small change. Trump is already waiting to start firing people. This will be reality TV like you never imagined.

Matt Wells

Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?

BBC News, Los Angeles

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing. But unlike Watergate, ”Katrinagate“ was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.

Instead of secretive ”Deep Throat“ meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.

Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.

They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.

Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.

It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.

'Lies or ignorance'

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.

The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland. This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the ”mainstream liberal media elite“.

But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.

On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.

As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.

And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.

Iraq concern

When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing ”a heck of a job“ and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.

The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.

It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury. And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.

The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.

He and others are calling the debacle the ”anti 9-11“: ”The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled,“ he wrote on Sunday.

”Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield.“

Media emboldened

It is way too early to tell whether this really will become ”Katrinagate“ for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.

Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.

Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.

Black America will not forget the government failures, and nor will the Gulf Coast region

Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively. The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.

People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.

Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.

Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.

The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: ”We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.

“Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame.”